Things Come Together And They Fall Apart

As a counselor I get to sit with a lot of people who are in some form of relational crisis. For some it’s a marriage breakdown or a betrayal of some kind. For others there is tension at work, or maybe they were just let go from their job. For others, they’ve just had a significant argument with someone that won’t be patched up anytime soon. In some cases, people feel like someone is out to get them or is trying to make their life miserable. 

No matter what the situation, I know that it is upsetting. When these kinds of things happen to me, I get a pit in my stomach. I don’t sleep very well. I feel distracted, and it’s hard to think of anything else. I want resolution somehow.

Our writer in Jeremiah 20 knows this all too well. The author says, “All those who were my friends are on the watch for any misstep of mine.”

Ugh.

It’s hard when it feels like the world is against us somehow – especially if we don’t feel like we have done anything in particular to provoke it.

Jesus is feeling some of this as well. In John 10 we’re told that, “the [people] picked up rocks to stone Jesus. Jesus answered them, ‘I have shown you many good works from God. For which of these are you trying to stone me?’”

While life provides us with some incredible moments of connection and beauty, it also provides us with some real difficult moments and times of disconnection. 

Maybe you have some situations like this in your life. It’s just hard to make sense of how things got to where they are. Or maybe there’s been a relational break, and you just can’t understand why. Perhaps you have replayed the situations over and over in your mind trying to figure out what happened.

I know that I have.

There’s no quick fix for this kind of relational breakdown, and rarely does it ever make sense. There just seems to be ‘stuff’ that we have to hold without much good reason. In some cases, we may be able to identify our part in things, but in others cases we don’t even know what went wrong.

Last year at Spiritus, we did a book study on Don Miguel Ruiz’s The Four Agreements. Many people are familiar with his work. His “second agreement” is Don’t take anything personally. About this he says,

Whatever happens around you, don’t take it personally. Nothing other people do is because of you. It is because of themselves. All people live in their own dream, in their own mind; they are in a completely different world from the one we live in. When we take something personally, we make the assumption that they know what is in our world, and we try to impose our world on their world.

Even when a situation seems so personal, even if others insult you directly, it has nothing to do with you. What they say, what they do, and the opinions they give are according to the agreements they have in their own minds…[I]f you do not take [things] personally, you are immune in the middle of hell. Immunity in the middle of hell is the gift of this agreement.

I’ll be honest, while I agree with the essence of this agreement, I find its application quite difficult! I take a lot of things personally because they FEEL personal.

But one thing I take from today’s readings is that there is a lot in life that we must just release – because we do not know why it is happening. Maybe someday we will have more information that makes it make sense, but for this moment the best we can hope for is to let it go.

The words of Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron have always been helpful to me – especially her book When Things Fall Apart. She says that when life breaks down or things fall apart, we often start thinking that we (or someone else) did something wrong. We try to return to the way things were. We start to develop all kinds of stories in our heads. 

She says, however, that, “things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”

Making room for grief and misery is something I am still working on! Maybe you are too. 

For today, perhaps we can just bring this pain of whatever unfinished business we’re carrying and lay it in God’s gentle embrace. Let God hold it with you. Try to breathe and release.